What Is The Best Portable Printer?

Best portable printer? That is not really a simple question. Best for what you need may be more to the point. If you’re only wanting photos then what’s best for you is not the same as what’s best for a businessman that needs a constant flow of printed documents.

A better way of asking the question could possibly be “What is the best all round printer?”, and for that there is an answer. A lot of people have different criteria when deciding what is best. However, there are common grounds where the best printer should be able to perform at a minimum.

In this article, we will discuss what makes a best portable printer and eventually what the best portable printer is.

Fast-Paced Printing

The best portable printer should be able to print at a fast speed. The number in this regard may be subjective when it comes to different individuals. People who have been exposed to high speed printing will have their own bars set compared to those who are not familiar with the words “high speed printing”.

For a mobile printer, a conservative minimum will have to be in a range of 10 pages per minute (ppm). A printing speed of 10 ppm should be enough for someone who has a portable lifestyle. May sound a little slow to some but we are talking portable and although 10 ppm for many is too slow, remember this is portable but you should be able to obtain a much faster speed than that.

High Resolution Printing

Of course, in order to make decent prints, a printer has to have a decent resolution. However, decent is not what we’re looking for. The best portable printer should be able to print at very high resolutions. For ordinary text printing, a resolution of 300 dpi will suffice.

Mass production and publishing even peg their resolutions at only 600 dpi and still maintain professional quality results. However many portable printers are made not only for printing texts but for pictures as well. This being the all round ability we are focusing on here.

In fact, most consumers who buy a portable printer buy it for their photo printing capability. In order to print great pictures, a printer should have a minimum resolution of around 1200 dpi both ways. Some printers have different horizontal and vertical resolutions so it would be better to point out that 1200 dpi is the minimum for both vertical and horizontal.

Battery Life

A portable gadget is no good unless it can print a lot of pages before running out of steam. It was not only recently that the term portable has been coined for printers that have internal batteries and not just because they are small. There is little point in portability that only lasts an hour.

In order to be an effective portable printer, it should be able to print a number of pages even with just its internal battery. Different people may have different preferences when it comes to the number. However, as a reference, the most number of pages on a fully charged battery can go as high as 480 pages for certain printer models.

If you take only the three features that make the best portable printer, it leaves us with only a handful of choices. However, there are two portable printers that are worthy of note. These 2 printers always come out at the top of any search and are by far the most popular and sought after of all the portable printers on the market.

Canon’s Pixma iP100 and HP’s OfficeJet H470 wbt http://www.amazon.com/HP-H470wbt-Officejet-Mobile-Printer/dp/B0010Z1UZ8/ref=pd_rhf_p_t_3. Both printers feature fast paced printing at around 20 ppm, twice the acceptable speed. Both printers can go beyond 1200 dpi in order to produce pictures of high quality and both printers are equipped with batteries that can print hundreds of pages on a fully charged battery.

Close Contest

It is hard to say which one of the two is better since each one has features that exceed the other. Nevertheless, the choice of the best portable printer still lies between the two.

The HP H470wbt has better printing speed and the economy is good with cost per page. Some however express dissatisfaction with the print quality. The color is generally highly regarded. The design is a plus point for the HP but regarded by some as expensive.

The Canon Pixma iP 100 has superior resolution and is not lacking in speed. The general opinion is that the Canon delivers better quality after making improvements on their last model the iP90. However it has no Wi-Fi option and is does not have integrated media card reader.

For a more detailed insight into their capability, then look at the multitude of reviews on both these popular portable printers. Its close in most departments but on value for money you have to plumb for the HP H470wbt. It retails higher but is wireless and battery supplied and adding them on to the Canon iP 100 sends the cost well in excess of the HP.

The conclusion being that if quality of prints is the most important thing to you, then maybe plumb for the Canon. If you want a good printer that does the job more than adequately at less cost, then go with the HP.